I grew up in mobile home in Southeastern Kentucky within a stones throw of a coal mine. My mother and father have had to absolutely kill themselves just provide what little we have. During college I worked two jobs in order to keep the rent paid. One of my best friends and current roomate, whom I met during my freshman year, is black. His mother is a judge, and his father is a financial analyst. Let it suffice that my family's entire living quarters could probably fit into his living room. Although he had no real interest in law, his family placed a considerable amount of pressure on him to pursue a career in law. We applied to many of the same schools because we felt that it would be nice if we could attend law school together. Despite having a 6 point lower LSAT score and a 4 point lower GPA he was accepted to all three of our top choices and I was denied.

AA is bull and you would be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.

But dood, unlike your wealthy African American friend, you are privileged! You belong to the mainstream culture! There are lots more white people on TV than black people. When you go into a 7-11, the clerk doesn't look at you susiciously. You can find bandaids that match your skin. As a lawyer you will be wearing lotsa suits, and didn't white guys invent suits?! I can go on and on. There is a whole checklist for why you are privileged (though the retarded suit thing isn't on it ), it's a couple of pages back. You should check it out and feel really guilty about what you just said!

Did you know that even the wealthiest black people face discrimination? I read this article about Robert Johnson, the first black billionaire, who was getting behind the wheel of his Mercedes Benz, and some racist old white lady ran out in an embarrassed huff. She assumed that he was the chauffer because he was black. That's REALLY screwed up - even Bob Johnson is discriminated against! I bet that never happens to you when you get into your Mercedes!

Why don't you just accept that you are privileged, go back to your double-wide and realize that you don't deserve to be treated like an equal human being because some other white doods who you have never met do the same thing to black people.

Uh oh...this thread starting to get to you? You've done so well in actually making intelligent argument, and now you piss it all away with this garbage.

Are you going to fly off the deep end like that other guy in the Is This Really The Case thread?

I grew up in mobile home in Southeastern Kentucky within a stones throw of a coal mine. My mother and father have had to absolutely kill themselves just provide what little we have. During college I worked two jobs in order to keep the rent paid. One of my best friends and current roomate, whom I met during my freshman year, is black. His mother is a judge, and his father is a financial analyst. Let it suffice that my family's entire living quarters could probably fit into his living room. Although he had no real interest in law, his family placed a considerable amount of pressure on him to pursue a career in law. We applied to many of the same schools because we felt that it would be nice if we could attend law school together. Despite having a 6 point lower LSAT score and a 4 point lower GPA he was accepted to all three of our top choices and I was denied.

AA is kept largely as a public relations ploy/interest group pander by large institutions. From their perspective, hiring is so arbitrary anyways (college doesn't actually prepare you to do work in a company--that's what on-the-job training is) that it doesn't matter. It's simply the easier to add 20 points to an application due to race (michigan) than it is to address any systemic wrongs (and I personally find the "stereotype threat" to be laughably absurd reason).

I'm not really certain how flexible the skills one learns in law school will be to another field because the skills you learn in law school are designed to mold you into a lawyer ... Wouldn't it just make more sense to master that other field instead?

If you're not sure what you want to be when you grow up, STOP. Do not go to grad school or professional school. Instead, take your college degree and start earning a paycheck. Figure out what you do and don't like.

Assuming little to no debt, is it wise to go through law school and get your JD if you really don't want to practice?

I hear advice both ways - that a JD is one of the last professional degrees that can help in many contexts, that it is a flexible degree, and that the skills taught in law school are applicable to many fields. I also hear that you lose the motivation to succeed in law school if you don't have a goal, or aren't sure about being there.

I'm white and well aware of the advantages I have because I'm white. And you are too. I'm also a woman and the daughter of working class parents who didn't go to college and yet I still realize, despite my gender/socioeconomic status, that in our society I was born on third base simply because of the color of my skin (and my parents' and their parents' and their parents'). Whatever your background may be - you were too. But unlike you, I don't go around pretending that I hit a triple.

I am actually all for AA, but I find the above highly offensive.

I moved to this country when I was 6, grew up in the ghetto, lived on welfare, dropped out of high school, worked full time while paying for a public TTT education, and am only barely being able to start entering the middle class. The only thing my white skin has done for me is help me get my ass kicked in junior high school for being "wonderbread".

Sure, African Americans as a wholesale demographic group are disadvantaged - but there are plenty of individual minorities who have lived much more comfortable lives than me, and I'm far from being the only one.

Another hard-lifer!

But anyway, no one is arguing anything close to contrary to what you're saying. We are [implying] that there are policy decisions in place - for a variety of reasons - that tends to consider things in broader terms.

Sorry if you fall through the cracks - you seem as if you'll end up just fine

But we might have to reconsider, with this vast amount of poor white kids that have had to overcome a whole world of problems! Maybe our socioeconomic and demographic calculations are all wrong! Perhaps there really are more than a sliver of minorities in leadership, ownership, and other high level professional positions (we just can't see them because we are so enlightened as to not see a person's skin color)!